The online-only campaign for the British Department for
Transport has captured 5 million views in five days.
They’re actors but they’re not acting.
When the mirror in a pub washroom explodes in front of them, each
of a trio of young guys is showered in glass and blood. They gasp for air in
panic as a head slams through the hole.
“We wanted something that linked road fatalities with drink
driving. So what better place than a pub,” Darren Thomas, deputy head of
account management at London ad agency Leo Burnett, told the Star.
“What better place than a pub?”
The online-only video campaign, the latest in a long association
between Leo Burnett and the British
Department for Transport’s anti-drunk driving effort, has captured
more than 5 million views in five days on YouTube.
It’s been called one of the most shocking drunk driving videos ever, all the more so because there’s no car and no gore in the 52-second clip.
“The car is there, it’s implied in the screech of brakes, the
windscreen shaped mirror, the crash sound effects and the head impacting the
glass like an actual car accident,” said Thomas.
And the shock is real. The actors didn’t know what was going to
happen when they walked into a real washroom of a real pub, only that a camera
was filming.
“We had to use actors for insurance, liability and legal reasons,
but their reactions are genuine,” said Thomas.
How did the actors recover from the shock?
“A cup of sugary tea and a cuddle.”
The woman’s head that shattered the washroom mirror was a
mannequin.
The video
was directed by veteran Ed Morris, whose award-winning work dates to the 1999
ad for Sony PlayStation “Double Life,” described as the “most awarded ad in the
world.”
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